I should have known the Sat Nav was plotting against me the moment it tried to send us through what looked like someone's beetroot field. There we were, three hours out of Zagreb, two children asking if we were nearly there for the forty-seventh time, and me insisting that "Toplicica" definitely meant something charming and thermal in Croatian. My husband, who had been suspiciously quiet since the Zagorje hills started looking identical, finally muttered that perhaps I should have printed the directions.

The mishap came five minutes later. I spotted a sign for Varazdin Toplicica and practically shrieked with triumph, only to discover I had directed us down a farm track that ended at a very unimpressed-looking donkey. The actual turn was another two hundred metres ahead, hidden behind a hedge that had clearly been growing since the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I laughed so hard I nearly needed the thermal waters before even arriving. The children, bless them, thought the donkey encounter was the highlight of the holiday so far.

When we finally crunched onto the proper gravel drive, the cottage sat there like something from a storybook, all wooden beams and terracotta roof tiles with climbing roses doing their best to take over the porch. My first thought was that it looked exactly like the photographs, which never happens. My second thought was that I could smell woodsmoke and something herby from the garden, and suddenly the donkey detour felt like necessary comic preamble.

The owner, a chap called Ivan who spoke better English than I do after three coffees, appeared from round the side clutching a basket of eggs. He did not mention the donkey, though I suspect word travels fast in villages of three hundred people. He showed us round with that particular Croatian mixture of pride and casualness, pointing out the outdoor grill, the covered terrace with its wonky wooden table, and the thermal pool that apparently stays warm enough even when the Zagorje weather remembers it is not actually the Mediterranean.

I had worried about cottage life chaos with two children under ten. Within an hour, my daughter had managed to get her foot stuck in a flowerpot she was using as a boat, and my son had discovered that the outdoor tap made an excellent water cannon if you blocked it just so. Ivan's eggs survived, which felt like a victory. The flowerpot did not.

What struck me most that first evening was the particular quality of the quiet. Not silence, exactly, because the countryside here hums with insects and distant tractors and the occasional enthusiastic dog. But a kind of spaciousness, the sort that makes you realise how much noise you normally carry around in your own head. I sat on that wonky terrace with a glass of local Graševina, watching my husband attempt to light the grill with the confidence of a man who has never successfully lit a grill in fifteen years of marriage, and felt something unknot between my shoulders.

The children fell asleep in their clothes, faces flushed from the thermal pool and the flowerpot incident. I did not move them. The grill eventually caught, producing sausages that tasted of smoke and triumph. We ate by candlelight because Ivan had mentioned the electrics could be temperamental, and somehow this felt like a feature rather than a flaw.

Lying in bed that night, listening to unfamiliar birds and my husband's familiar snoring, I thought about how I had planned this break within an inch of its life. Spreadsheets of day trips. Lists of restaurants. The full anxious tourist package. And here we were, not five miles from where we started the day, with a broken flowerpot and egg-shaped bruises from laughing, and I could not remember the last time I had felt so properly still. The Sat Nav had tried to ruin us. The donkey had judged us. None of it mattered. We had arrived, more or less, exactly where we needed to be.